The Patty Problem

I don’t care if I’m banished from the in-crowd; I’m going to admit it anyway: I’m not in love with “Freedom,” so far. Much to the chagrin of two of my good friends, both of whom cried upon finishing it (and read it in the confines of a week), I’m not zipping through the almost six-hundred-page tome. I’m halfway through, and as my colleague Jon Michaud pointed out, having a large chunk of pages on the right-hand side can be a bit dismaying when the pages on the left took a fair amount of determination to get through.

The thing is, I love parts of it. Joey Berglund, son of Walter and the infamous Patty, is intriguing: he has an extremely tender heart that he tries so hard to keep in check, and his capacity for self-evaluation is affecting, especially for someone of college age. Despite his obvious flaws, I do like Walter—it’s not very often that we meet someone so sure of what it is that he wants and who loves his partner so unconditionally. However, as much as I loved Franzen’s recent piece in the magazine about the decimation of migratory birds in Europe, I’m not wild about reading all the details of Walter’s job.

My biggest problem, though, is that I find Patty almost unbearable. Maybe Franzen meant it to be this way, but she’s so difficult to stomach that I find hardly any enjoyment in reading the sections of “Freedom” that are devoted to her (and of which there are many). Go to therapy!, I want to scream at her. But then I feel guilty for being judgmental—it’s pretty obvious (and this is not a spoiler) that poor Patty suffers from a raging case of clinical depression.

I’ve thought about putting “Freedom” down, digging into another of the books on my literary bucket list. But Franzen’s latest has become a cultural phenomenon. His glasses were stolen and it was written about everywhere. He made up with Oprah. He was the first living novelist to be on the cover of Time magazine in a decade. He was snubbed for the National Book Award. Plus—surprise!—he’s an awe-inducing writer. There are sentences in “Freedom” that make me want to never attempt writing again—what’s the point, when there are people out there who write things like this:

Behind her, you could see the baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.